This place…again…this place has seen so much. Which is strange, because it’s only when I think about it, that I realise how many important moments have happened here. It’s such a soulless place, so clean and bland, so lacking in character and romance.

This was where she told me she was leaving. It didn’t happen for another year, of course, but this was the place. We sat in this big, empty space and talked, and she told me it was over. The beginning of the end? Or the start of something new? A necessary ending, it would seem, that set me back on a path I should have been on all along. The place seemed strange then, new, and I felt like I didn’t belong there. Right at that moment, I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.

This was where she told me she was staying, and like a fool I didn’t say no. She stayed for two years, mostly unwelcome. I was still trying to put my head back together and, for a while, being needed felt good. In time being needed felt worse than anything, incapable as she was of doing anything for herself. No, not incapable, unwilling. Which made it all the more frustrating.

This was where I fell apart. It was a long time coming, really. Too much drink, not just that night but over the year or so before. But that night, too much drink, too many hands in places I didn’t want to see them, too much stupid for one mind. My stupid, that is, it’s always my stupid. Something finally broke. It needed to. Things changed after that.

This is where I am, looking out the window at the sun rise. She’s in the bed behind me, but not in the way I wanted for so long, in the right way. This is good. Sober, positive, clear of mind.

To this place I shall return, now so familiar, it almost defines me. The way in which I enter, the place that’s seen my destruction many times over, now makes me what I am.